CROSS COUNTRY
James Patterson
Little, Brown and Company
Thriller
ISBN: 9780316018722
There is always the possibility --- remote though it may be --- that you haven’t read one of James Patterson’s Alex Cross thrillers for a while. Maybe you jumped off a few books ago while Patterson was still titling his novels in the series after nursery rhymes (and, considering the events that took place between the covers, deceptively so). If that is the case, I would strongly suggest that you jump back in immediately with Patterson’s latest volume in the Cross mythos. It is a wild night’s ride like few you have read.
Patterson has not forsaken his trademark style in CROSS COUNTRY. The short chapters lend themselves well to his goal of moving the story right along, with the reader in tow. The basic plot is easy enough to follow. An old friend --- a former flame, actually --- of Alex Cross is murdered, and Cross, seeking something between justice and revenge, pursues the killer. It is the details within the plot, however, that grab you and suck you in. Cross’s friend is Ellie Randall Cox, an attorney who, with her family, is the victim of a horrific home invasion that leaves everyone in the house mutilated and slaughtered. It is the worst crime scene that Cross has ever witnessed, and the horror of it is magnified one-hundredfold when he learns that Cox, a friend from his college days and his first love, is one of the victims.
Cross all too quickly learns that the perpetrator of this unspeakable act is a Nigerian warlord known only as the Tiger, who heads a highly disciplined gang of teenaged thugs in the Washington, D.C. area. As the gang takes other victims in the area, Cross goes after them with a vengeance, only to discover that the trail of the Tiger leads back to Nigeria. Cross boldly pursues the Tiger to his native country and experiences some deadly culture shock almost from the moment he arrives in Lagos. He finds that his existence as a United States citizen, a law enforcement officer, even as a so-called African-American, means nothing in Nigeria.
Cross is arrested, jailed, tortured, beaten and starved to within an inch of his life. Unbelievably, the circumstances of most of the citizens of the Nigerian nation, and that of neighboring Sierra Leone, are even worse. Cross has few allies, and of those, there are even fewer he can trust. Things become worse, however, when he returns to Washington, D.C. to find that the Tiger has exploited that which is perhaps Cross’s greatest weakness, an act that may well change his life forever.
CROSS COUNTRY is Patterson’s most riveting Cross novel in years. The dramatic change of locale as well as the introduction of an adversary who is a more than worthy foe for Cross makes the book unforgettable, especially with its account of the sufferings endured by the Nigerian people to this day. Patterson does not sugarcoat his description of the atrocities that take place --- you can hear just as bad, if not worse, from any Nigerian refugee in your community --- so that CROSS COUNTRY is even more violent than some of its predecessors. What is truly frightening is that what is described at the beginning of the novel may be coming to a neighborhood near you, if it is not there already.
--- Reviewed by Joe Hartlaub
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